README FILE for"Estimating the Impacts of Program Benefits: Using Instrumental Variables with Underreported and Imputed Data"by Melvin Stephens, Jr. and Takashi UnayamaDate: April 10, 20181. How to Obtain the Japanese Family Income and Expenditure Survey (JFIES) Data The programs listed below require microdata from Japanese Family Income and Expenditure Survey (JFIES). The survey datasets are the property of Statistical Bureau of Japan (SBJ) and are not publicly available. They were made available to the authors with the permission based on Article 33 of Japanese Statistics Act (Act No. 18 of 1947). It would be basically available for academic researchers, while application and other documentation should be written in Japanese. 2. Data Format and Dictionary filesOnce a researcher is permitted to use the data, a fixed-length format file will be given. The length of file would be same for all researchers but variables not appeared in the application are masked and so contents of file are different depending on their research plan. Masked variablea are filled with blank. To use the fixed-length format data, we have converted the original data into STATA format using “infile” command with dictionary files given here.3. Used Software We used STATA version 15 on MAC OS.4. STATA CodeUsing our STATA code, the directory structure should be as below: "Woking Directory" ----- “ORG_JFIES” (Original files given by SBJ)                       |                       |                       ----Dictionary (Dictionary files we made)                      Three .do files are in "Working Directory" and contents of each file are below(a) Stephens_Unayama.do:  This is the main file for data constructions and regressions.(b) Make_Sub_ID.do: This is a sub-routine to make household ID (see Unayama, 2011).(c) Make_Calculating_Benefit.do:  This is a sub-routine to calculate the imputed amount of child benefits (see Stephens and Unayama, 2015)."Working Directory" also contains "CPI.dta" and "Calendar.dta", in which the Japanese Consumer Price Index and calendar information is available, respectively. They are merged with the main JFIES data.

5. Results file

The regression results are provided in “Results_RESTAT_Final.txt”.

<Reference>

Unayama, Takashi (2011) “Family income and expenditure survey as a panel data: Construction of permanent household ID” (Kakei Chosa no Panel-ka ni-tsuite), Kokumin Keizai Zasshi Vol. 204, pp. 51-64. (http://www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/repository/81008361.pdf ). IN JAPANESE
Melvin Stephens Jr & Takashi Unayama (2015) "Child benefit payments and household wealth accumulation," The Japanese Economic Review vol. 66(4) pp. 447-465.

